LISTEN NOW: Who Gets Marriage Right? This Woman Traveled The World To Find The Answer

Marriage is hard. We’ve all heard it. But how hard is it and what can we do about it? And how do we do it when we’re working until 9pm and addicted to our screens? Looking for the answers while in her first year of marriage, 35-year-old Jo Piazza traveled around the world crowdsourcing marriage advice and wisdom from women from different cultures. In her new book, How to Be Married (What I Learned From Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First Really Hard Year of Marriage), Piazza shares everything she learned from the women she met: in France she learned why a woman should be her husband’s mistress, in Israel she discovered that you need to secure your own oxygen mask before helping others and in Kenya she found out what women who live in polygamous tribes really think about polygamy.

Piazza, about to give birth to her first child, joined me at the kitchen table for a Mentoring Moments podcast. Who gets marriage right? Here’s an excerpt from our podcast, in Piazza’s words, condensed and edited:

Oh, These French Women

French women often think that they know how to do everything better than everyone else. Not just American women, but everyone else, including French men.

Jo Piazza and Nick Aster

Courtesy of Jo Piazza

They had so much interesting advice for me about marriage. The number one advice from French women was to “be your husband’s mistress,” which sounds terrible when you first just throw it out there, but then they really unpacked it. They told me it’s about making a conscious choice to choose that person every day. It’s relatable to marriage and to a career. To not just let it be a thing that unfolds and gets stale and boring, but to make it continually exciting.

Things start being boring because we let them be boring. They said that. They're like, “You, Americans think the engagement and the wedding are the prize, the goal. You don’t talk about the journey and the adventure afterwards.

One of the most important things that I learned is that when you get married, you don't become one. You have to maintain your independence and your own life outside of your marriage. You should sleep apart from your spouse once a week or every other week. You should travel on your own. Why? To remember why life is better when they’re there and to make them miss you a little bit. That was another piece of advice from the French women who know how to do everything in life better than Americans—to maintain that mystery and also to just have a moment to take care of yourself.

Americans Get Marriage Wrong

Who gets marriage right and who gets marriage wrong? I think Americans get marriage wrong. Americans love to complain about marriage. That’s a thing “I’m done with.” I'm done with complaining. It’s not useful.

Stop complaining and fix it. As I was doing the interviews around the world—and I’m talking about really far-flung tribes in Northeastern India and lawmakers in Sweden— women would look at me skeptically when I would say, “I’m trying to figure out marriage.” They’re like, “You Americans make marriage so hard. Why do you complain? Why can't you just have a good marriage, appreciate it, have gratitude for it say ‘thank you,’ and enjoy yourselves? You like to make it harder than it has to be.”

That was interesting for me to hear because it’s true. My girlfriends are complaining about their marriages all the time instead of saying, “My husband did this awesome thing.” We’re not talking about the happy things—we’re more interested in sharing and hearing the sob stories. We’re in a unique place in America right now because this is really the first generation of women that doesn't have to get married for any reason other than because we want to. We don't need a man to have a baby. We can support ourselves. We can protect ourselves. We can just leave. All of that can create a lot of pressure.

I love being married to my husband. Sure, he does things that are super annoying sometimes. I'm done with waking up and looking at the negative things. I want to wake up everyday and feel really excited about my marriage and my life.

To hear Piazza’s stories behind the quotes below, take a listen to our podcast:

I’m taking a year off when my baby is born. This is my feminist choice.

I’m done with screens in the bedroom.

You slave away and you think that your job is your everything, and it’s not.

Every time I had a bad breakup, something better came along.

I'm trying to embrace getting comfortable with not knowing.

I don't take enough time to do nothing.

I would love to see us get back to the kind of culture where we embrace having different generations under the same roof.

This is Mentoring Moments—a series of stories about triumphs and skids from successful women. Mentoring Moments is now a podcast.